That's right, Google got takedown notices about MegaUpload yesterday, despite the fact that the site has been defunct since mid-January. Same thing with Demonoid and BTJunkie, even though those sites don't exist anymore either, and the content the offending links point to is long gone. That picture above is a list of requests that include MegaUpload urls. It's an awful lot of takedown requests for a site that's been taken down itself.

Who's sending all these requests? Take a peek at Google's Transparency Report and you can see they're big name rightsholders like Sony, Universal, Warner and EMI. They aren't issuing the requests themselves, of course, they've got reporting agencies to do it, but still no one in the chain has noticed Megaupload links don't work anymore.

Why? It's a symptom of an increasingly automated copyright-enforcement process, the same kind of behavior that gets good content caught in the crossfire. And with takedown requests doubling in the last year, you kind of have to wonder how many of them might not be pointing to anything. It might be absurd to carefully monitor each and every request, but maybe rightsholders should at least brush up on their current events and keep track of which enemies they've already slain. [Google via TorrentFreak]